ABSTRACT
This chapter is largely based on my own experience, either as a political candidate or as a journalist, covering every Swedish election campaign during the past five decades, in addition to my experience as an observer, present in the United States, of more than 20 US elections as well as the Italian election of 2018. The point of departure of this chapter is an examination of the role of digitalized communication in the election of Donald Trump and an exploration of how the digital revolution has changed Swedish politics. In both the United States and Sweden, while political parties are eroding, the digital revolution is enabling individual voters to access masses of data and to act and react online. An apparent result of this process is a dramatic polarization of the political conversation. The Swedish news media market has changed, and yet we are still only at the very beginning of a major transformation that will be complete when digital media have entirely replaced print media. In addition to my own experience and reading on the topic, this chapter is based on research conducted by the Swedish Government’s Democracy Commission as well as the work of the Government’s Digitalization Investigation.
